Structural Composites - Online

Our online composite materials course includes Glassfibre, Carbonfibre, Kevlar, Bauxite, Silicon Carbide and others. These materials used as a composite, designed with a matrix material such as epoxy, enable tailored designs of structures for strength, stiffness and lightweight. Composite materials are now used in almost every industry. From over 40 years experience in Composites you will learn the practical application of designing for composite applications and you will do the composite stress analysis by hand calculation and by using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). You will learn about each composite manufacturing process as this is essential to help you design using composite materials. The course also covers particulates, short fibre and continuous fibre composites, hybrid sustainable biocomposites and natural fibres and the optimisation of mechanically or bonded fastened composite joints.

​​​​​​The use of carbonfibre and other composite materials is rapidly expanding and pervades all markets. Carbonfibre had an estimated annual growth of 12% from 2012–2018. The strongest demand for carbonfibre composites comes from aircraft and aerospace, wind energy and the automotive industry. This means that if you want to go into the composites world, the opportunities for you are huge. 

If you are a graduate engineer or company manager, excited but bewildered by the growing composite industry and interested in designing composite components but would like to know where to start in structural composite materials, then this online composite course is for you.

The online course is a set of four educational videos, each video progressively takes the student or the newcomer to composites deeper into the world of composites. 

One video is released (with accompanying lecture notes) per day as follows:

1. Structural Composites for all sectors
2. The merits of using Structural Composites
3. Layered Composites
4. An Engineers start in Structural composites
   

From an engineer’s approach I will show you where to start in the process of designing with composites.
You will learn:

• where to start the initial design and composite component sizing
• what you need to know to calculate the thickness of a ply
• how to tailor the composite ply for the engineering benefits you seek
  

This Introduction to Structural Composites Course also contains:

• a short history of composite materials
• the best way to start to understand the world of composite materials
• what is a composite material?
• the merits of using composites materials
• how composite material properties are different to metals
• how to tailor the composite to suit your performance requirements
• two essential composite properties that you need to know
• the simple building block composite design approach
• the simplest and most popular technique to make a composite material
  

I have filtered out the important aspects to give you a very quick understanding of Structural Composite Materials. 

Important: This online course is intended to be suitable for beginners in composites to provide you with a basic understanding of composites. There are other courses featured on this website which cover the mathematics of designing structural composites.